Across the Bar

Before his gig later that night at Deep Ellum Live as part of the Music Against Brain Degeneration Revue -- which features half-hour sets by The Flaming Lips, Sebadoh, Sonic Boom's E.A.R., and IQU -- Robyn Hitchcock will perform at Bill's Records on Sunday at 3 p.m. And considering the amount of rock-and-roll detritus covering every available surface in the store, hearing Hitchcock free-associate at Bill's might be the better of his two appearances...

Centro-matic's 14-track collection of odds and ends accumulated over the past three years, The Static vs. The Strings, hits stores on August 10 on Matt Barnhart's Quality Park Records. The band will put another dent in Will Johnson's expansive arsenal of songs early next year, when it will release another full-length, again on Quality Park. Barnhart's label, meanwhile, will reissue The Baptist Generals' debut EP, Dog, in September, with a trio of songs that didn't make it onto the initial 100-copy pressing. Quality Park also is making plans to begin distributing Leaning House Jazz releases, as well as putting together a compilation featuring a selection of Denton bands...

Just as it did at Rick's Place this past weekend, Tripping Daisy will headline a pair of shows at The Curtain Club on August 13 and 14. Continuing its recent habit of playing with bands that could be tough acts to follow, the Daisy shares the stage with Jet and Asphalt the Recorder on Friday, and Captain Audio and Lewis the following night. On a related note, the label the band formed earlier this year, Good Records, will reportedly issue a disc sometime in the near future featuring recordings by former UFOFU singer-guitarist Joe Butcher. No word as to when that will happen, or even if it definitely will. That's why it's called a rumor...

If you don't get down to Lower Greenville much, and most of the time that's not a bad strategy, you might not know that Todd Deatherage has been performing every Monday night at Muddy Waters for the past month or so. If you happen to catch one of his shows, you're likely to hear a slew of new songs. The Calways' singer-guitarist says the band is currently working on a new album, to be released sometime this fall on Twin Buddha Records, with ex-Hagfish drummer Tony Barsotti (and Deatherage's co-worker at Terilli's) sitting in with the group in the studio. Deatherage is also lending a hand to The Darlingtons as they demo songs for their next record...

Deluxe Records, a new local label run by Luis Lima, enters the fray in September with a compilation featuring songs by Reed Easterwood, The Deathray Davies, Fury III, Crash Vinyl, Carter Albrecht, Meredith Miller, and Junky Southern, among others. One of the others, The Limes, is the first band Lima has signed to Deluxe. The Limes recently finished recording at the aforementioned Last Beat Studios, and the group will release its first album for the label in October...

DJ Merritt -- the host of Edgeclub, the Saturday-night mix-show on KDGE-FM (94.5) -- has contributed a track to Torchbearers, due out on Risk Records on August 10. Merritt's offering, "Slappin' Skinz," is joined on the disc by songs from 10 other mix-show hosts from around the country, including Liquid Todd (New York), Jason Bentley and Christian B (Los Angeles), and Aaron Axelson (San Francisco). It's the first attempt at producing for Merritt, who has hosted Edgeclub since 1996. Catch him at Lizard Lounge on August 21, when he opens for Moby...

A lucky few have heard The Tomorrowpeople's version of The Toadies' "Possum Kingdom," which the band recently recorded. The song, a sort of techno take on the original, may or may not appear on The Great Dallas Cover-Up, the Dallas-bands-covering-Dallas-bands compilation One Ton Records plans to put out this fall. (Which is likely well before One Ton boss Aden Holt stops being mad at us for spilling the beans about the album while it was still in the planning stages. Oops.) Ask the group to play it on August 14, when they perform at the Galaxy Club with Vibrolux...

In case you missed it -- and you probably did, seeing as it appeared in the FW Weekly -- Go Metric USA has not broken up, as an ad for The Wreck Room led some people to believe. The show was advertised as an hour-and-a-half retrospective of the group's entire output, which singer-guitarist Mitch Greer recently admitted would have meant that the band would have had to play every song it ever wrote twice. There have been quite a few changes concerning Go Metric however, as only Greer and drummer T.J. Prendergast remain from the lineup that recorded last year's Three Chords by Two Verses. You can see the new version of the band on August 6, when Go Metric performs at Trees with Chomsky...

Not sure if this speaks to the quality of Weener's tribute to Weezer, or the relative lack of short-term memory by area audiences, but at least one fan at the band's recent performance at Rick's Place was wondering whether Weener had any CDs for sale. Too bad Rivers Cuomo and the boys had a couple of hits a few years ago, or else Weener could really be making a killing right now.